A Push to Rebuild a Modernist Gem by Mies

By Gerrit Wiesmann

March 31, 2016

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Mies van der Rohe in 1968.CreditAssociated Press

BERLIN — For almost 20 years, the stern, cuboid forms of the German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Wolf House loomed over the town of Guben on the Neisse River in Germany. But in 1945, as the Soviet Army approached from the east, the owners of the house, the Wolf family, fled, and their home was destroyed in the chaos that ensued.

Although the house was destroyed, it was never quite forgotten. Now, a group of German architects and planners has started a campaign to rebuild the Wolf House, widely seen as a link between Mies’s early, more conventional designs and his later buildings, like the Barcelona Pavilion and the Farnsworth House, that would redefine modern architecture.

“The Wolf House is a milestone in architectural history,” said Florian Mausbach, a retired German planning official who is one of the leaders of the campaign. “It was Mies’s first step into Modernism, a major step for the whole movement.”

But the plan has run into resistance from other architects and scholars who say that the Wolf House would be too hard to reconstruct — and that even if it could be rebuilt, the result would offer at best an incomplete rendering of Mies’s vision. The debate has particular resonance in Germany, where reconstruction of structures destroyed in World War II has been a contentious issue, with some critics characterizing reconstruction as an attempt to erase memories of Nazism.

Mr. Mausbach is hoping to raise about 2 million euros, or about $2.25 million, to rebuild the Wolf House, working from new drawings developed by architecture students from old photos and sketches. The new structure, he said, would be an important German-Polish cultural project that could eventually become Europe’s first Mies museum. (The main part of Guben became Polish after World War II and is now called Gubin; a section on the west bank of the Neisse remained in German hands and retains the German name of Guben.)

Mr. Mausbach’s group kicked off the project in March with a symposium in Berlin, and a small exhibition about the Wolf House, including the new drawings, is at the Berlin State Library, across Potsdamer Strasse from Mies’s Neue Nationalgalerie building, until April 9. The exhibition will travel to other German cities and to Poland, and later to Chicago, Mr. Mausbach said.

The villa was commissioned in 1925 by Erich Wolf, a textile manufacturer with a penchant for modern art. Given total design freedom, Mies abandoned the traditional pitched roof in favor of a flat one for the first time.

Experts say this allowed him to experiment with the floor plan, and he came up with three diagonally linked ground-floor reception rooms in which movement was unimpeded by connecting walls. The new sense of space was heightened by the house’s perch over the Neisse Valley.

“Mies enjoyed the bourgeois lifestyle, but as an architect he was extremely radical at heart,” said Dietrich Neumann, a professor of architectural history at Brown University, who advises Mr. Mausbach and supports his efforts.

“The Wolf House undermined the axial enfilade of reception rooms of the 19th-century bourgeoisie,” Mr. Neumann added. “It’s the first time we get the open space which becomes so definitive of Mies and of 20th-century architecture. Mies wanted people to experience space through movement.”

Mr. Mausbach and Mr. Neumann believe that the Wolf House should be rebuilt because they say that Mies’s genius can best be understood by walking though his buildings.

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A contemporary drawing and floor plan of Wolf House based on photographs and original sketches.CreditPotsdam School of Architecture, Potsdam University of Applied Sciences

They noted that the Barcelona Pavilion in Spain, a temporary structure built for the 1929 World’s Fair, was rebuilt in 1986 amid heated debates about accuracy and authenticity. Although its interior color scheme is in part guesswork, based on black-and-white photos, and its structure partly different than the original, the reconstruction is almost universally acclaimed today for the insights it has rendered.

But not everyone is convinced that the same can be said about the Wolf House.

“I think the Wolf House is an important building, and I think the reconstruction of the Barcelona Pavilion deepened our understanding of Mies,” said Leo Schmidt, a professor of architecture at Brandenburg Technical University in Cottbus, Germany. “But rebuilding the Wolf House as an empty shell would not deepen our understanding of Mies.”

Mr. Schmidt, who has organized a petition of 40 heritage experts opposed to the project, says that the Wolf House, as a complicated structure that was designed to accommodate the Wolf family’s collection of costly furnishings, would be much harder to rebuild than the smaller, simpler Barcelona Pavilion.

“We know the Wolfs furnished their house in an opulent way, but we know very few details,” he said. “The rebuilt house could end up with bare, white-walled rooms, giving modern visitors a totally false impression of the spaces Mies originally created.”

The Wolf House began to be rescued from obscurity about 20 years ago through the efforts of a group of academics, including Mr. Schmidt and Barry Bergdoll, a professor of art history at Columbia University and the former chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which houses Mies’s archives. In 2001, Mr. Schmidt led an archaeological dig at the site in which shards from the Wolf family’s collection of porcelain were discovered as well as parts of the cellar walls, which could then be mapped.

Mr. Schmidt is proposing that the villa’s ruins be preserved and the house’s importance be marked in some way other than rebuilding. “Every object bears testimony to the people and the events that shaped it,” he said. “Reconstruction is a way of denying that history.”

In Germany, attitudes toward reconstruction seemed to soften after German reunification in 1990, in part because of the successful rebuilding of the Baroque Frauenkirche in Dresden, which had been destroyed by Allied bombing raids in World War II.

In Berlin, a partial reconstruction of the Hohenzollern Palace, the Stadtschloss, is underway after a vociferous debate about whether rebuilding a replica of the Schloss - a symbol of German imperialism that was bombed in World War II and then torn down by the Communist East Germans in 1950 - was a denial of German history.

“I have always viewed buildings as built history,’’ he said. “We should be able to experience the history of a city or a country through its buildings – a few symbolic buildings.”

Mr. Bergdoll said he had doubts about the shift in German attitudes toward reconstruction.

“There’s a huge wave of nostalgia, which I find hard to understand,” he said, adding that he had “deep ambivalence” about any reconstruction, including that of the Wolf House.

Nonetheless, he said that visiting the Barcelona Pavilion had persuaded him of that reconstruction’s worth.

“I wouldn’t refuse to see the Wolf House, either,” Mr. Bergdoll said. “But I wouldn’t hurry to go see it.”

Correction:

An earlier version of a picture credit with this article misstated the name of the university. The photo was from the Potsdam School of Architecture, Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, not University of Potsdam.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: Plan to Rebuild Modernist Gem by Mies Divides Those Who Treasure It. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe